Speaking in New York, at a combative press conference where he controversially renewed his claim that there was wrong on both sides involved in a street fight about a civil war statue of a Confederate general on a high horse at Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump was asked about chief executive officers leaving his advisory manufacturing council in protest.

He slammed them, saying, “they’re not taking their jobs seriously as it pertains to this country . . . If you look at Merck as an example, take a look at where their product is made. It’s made outside of our country. We want products made in the country . . . You can’t do it necessarily in Ireland and all of these other places. You have to bring this work back to this country.”

That a president of the US is singling out Ireland in response to lost US jobs is bad news. And it matters a lot more to Ireland than the details of a street fight in middle America. You would not think so from the relative media coverage here.

That street fight provides good self-righteous TV footage, easily and cheaply available, with cardboard cut-out bad guys in the form of Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members. Trump makes good copy.

He equivocated when it came to condemning those who perpetrated the worst violence at Charlottesville, but he voiced the reservations of many Americans when he claimed there had been violence on the other side, from a small number who reportedly came with baseball bats to confront a lawful, if odious, right-wing demonstration against the removal of a statue.

Trump is a sometimes odious and frightening president, but he was elected fairly under the American system.

Irish fascination with his antics is tinged by a certain air of superiority that leaves us open to accusations of hypocrisy.

We have, after all, attracted US jobs offshore by means of incentives that seem to have come to have no social bottom line.

We hide behind the shield of Nato without paying a penny for it, and cutely let the US buy facilities at Shannon while we take the neutral high ground.

And what of our own Civil War monuments?

We jettisoned various statues of Queen Victoria after independence, but what if we were to tear down monuments to those who rejected democracy in 1922 when most people accepted the Treaty, or various unofficial memorials to the later IRA? Would those opposing such iconography be dismissed as fascists?

That’s what it was. A very small but vocal group of facists and anti-facists taht have been chasing each other aroundthe country and posting you tube videos.
Idendity politics taken to its pitiful limits.

What is it about centrist types who as an aside agree that Trump and Nazis are bad but spend the rest of the time accusing people who criticise Trump and actively oppose Nazis bad hypocrisy without actually identifying any hypocrisy but seem to think they have sounded a note of caution about them? Baseball bats? The Nazis had an armed militia lining the street for them!

In fairness though, I’m seeing lots of high profile centrists who used to describe the left as “alt left” in an attempt to equate them with the nazis now describe *themselves* as alt left so I guess you’re only following a trend. A weasely trend but a trend.

So annoying when other people don’t follow the script you wrote for them in your head! You have to keep writing the side of the argument you wanted them to write for them! Inconsiderate that’s what it is.

Tax evasion over nazism. Bravo, Kenny! Should you mom had been a war widow with a bunch of under-aged kids, working her ass off in a factory 10h a day 6 days a week building tractors, so another war widow with a bunch of under-aged kids ploughed the fields around the clock and grew cattle to feed people after the war.
I thought I’ve heard it all, but no, there is always an asshole that surpasses previous records.
I would very much like this article to be reinstated. So we all take time to reflect properly.

“Tax evasion over nazism” is reference to Kenny’s priorities list: preservation of low tax regime in Ireland supercedes the tragedy of nazi march.
Back in 30s there were some among intellectual elites mocking nazis as idiots. But unlike Kenny, they did not have the benefit of hindsight. And what a hindsight.
Yeah….

…thanks…I’d like to think I had some influence on the defeat of hawkish Hillary but even I’m not so vain*…crooked Hillary had a nice ring to it…as well as the ring of truth…
*everyone knows it was Bodger